


Red Remorse

by AParticularlyLargeBear



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Corruption, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Red Lyrium
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-12
Updated: 2015-12-12
Packaged: 2018-05-06 09:46:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5412218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AParticularlyLargeBear/pseuds/AParticularlyLargeBear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trevelyan has been exposed to red lyrium.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Remorse

Three guards outside the first door. Shifts. Twelve in total throughout the day, every day.

They’d become used to Bull’s comings and goings by now. He made sure to visit regularly; twice daily, sometimes for hours at a time. At first they’d been on edge with him, wondering if he might do something stupid. Bull figured that they would have been briefed, told to watch out for any impromptu jailbreaks. By two weeks in, though, they’d become more relaxed. Sort of. More relaxed with Bull swinging by, anyway.

Bull figured that Leliana still had people keeping an eye on him, was still coaching vigilance. He didn’t blame her. If their positions were switched, he’d be doing the same thing. Hell, he’d even entertained the notion of breaking the prisoner out, before discarding it as a waste. Where would there be to escape to? The cell was in the middle of Skyhold, and a military fortification wasn’t the type of place you wanted to be trying to sneak a fugitive through.

Two guards on the second door. Six overall. New ones every week. Grimmer expressions on these ones, and this was only the third day of their rotation. Standing watch for so long, over somebody that was supposed to be on your side… yeah, that took a toll. Didn’t have to be Ben-Hassrath to see that. These ones were picked from the Spymaster’s agents too, probably the Nightingale’s failsafe on their loyalty. Pick from the people you know you can trust.

That was a waste of time, so far as Bull was concerned. Spies were spies, not sentries. Give a spy too much time to sit on their ass thinking, and that was when you started to get problems. That was when people got creative… or when they started to think too hard about their job.

Yeah. That one he knew all about.

One guard on the third door. Not just any guard, though. A templar. Standing vigil in a room that was almost as much a cell as the one beyond it, bare and spartan. Only two of these, and the same ones since the start.

Bull knew some of the higher ups had wanted to change the guards on the inner door every day. Prevent suspicion, prevent dissension, and prevent sympathy. Other voices had argued against that, and other voices had eventually won out, for a very simple reason.

Why risk crushing morale for every templar in Skyhold, by forcing them to take turns guarding their own Inquisitor?

The woman standing watch looked over to him as he entered the room, the door clicking shut behind him. Dark circles smudged her eyes, but she stood straight and proud, torchlight gleaming off of her armour.

“Iron Bull,” she managed a smile. “I was starting to wonder if you’d been waylaid. You’re five minutes late.”

Bull’s return smile was just as mirthless, just as tired. It didn’t matter. There was solidarity in this. “You doing okay, Lysette?”

Lysette shrugged. “No. But how could I be?”

He nodded in acknowledgment of the point, hesitated an instant. “How is she?”

Lysette’s eyes dropped. Her shoulders slumped slightly. “Quiet, today. No screaming or… or _humming_ , thank the Maker.”

Not lively then. Not reassuring. He didn’t envy Lysette’s watch, but he would have traded places with her in a heartbeat, if it had meant lifting this crushing feeling of _uselessness_ that had settled onto his shoulders. Bull wasn’t a mage or a scholar. He wasn’t even a qunari anymore. There was no certainty and no conviction, other than in the knowledge that there was nothing he could do.

He sighed, gestured to the final door. Lysette nodded wearily, and trudged across the room to retrieve a small iron key from a hook on the wall. The door was no ordinary one; wood backed with steel and faintly glowing with enchantments and lyrium etchings. There was a small viewing slot, but other than that, it resembled something that could have guarded a vault, let alone a single prisoner. Lysette placed the key into the sturdy lock of the cell door and turned it with a click, pushed it open, and gestured inside.

“I’ll lock it behind you, as normal. Just knock when you’re ready,” she told him.

“Sure thing,” he replied, even though they both knew that he wouldn’t, and they both knew she’d be the one knocking, to tell him that it was time to leave.

He stepped into the cell, and with a heavy thunk, the door shut behind him.

The cell was well furnished. A bed, a small dresser, a little desk and chair, even a bookshelf. It was not the severe and austere surroundings of a qunari prison, nor the sparsely outfitted confines of the other Skyhold cells. Everybody had done their best to ensure that it was comfortable. It was the least they could offer.

Its occupant sat cross-legged on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. She didn’t stir at Bull’s entry, although she must have heard him.

From here, at a perfunctory glance, Bull could almost fool himself into believing that everything was all right, and that Elizabeth was just feeling contemplative; any other oddity being a mere trick of the light.

“Hey, Kadan,” he murmured.

For several seconds, she remained motionless. Then, with aching slowness, she tilted her head downwards.

And getting the slightest glimpse of her eyes was enough to blow away any such dreams of normalcy.

Brown. They were supposed to be brown.

Today, they gleamed a dull crimson, subsuming the darker colour, reducing it to only faint specks. Capillaries of red bled into the rest, turning her gaze into the nightmarish stare of something beyond the far side of the Fade.

“Bull,” she said the word slowly, stretching it out, over-enunciating every sound, as if dissecting his name with her voice.

“How’s it going?” he tried to inject some semblance of enthusiasm into his voice.

Elizabeth’s eyes bored into him. She said nothing, and the silence began to stretch. She didn’t blink. She barely even seemed to breathe. The scar that ran the length of her right cheek shone wetly in the dim light. Bull had tried to weasel the story of that scar out of her half a dozen times, and received half a dozen answers, from the mundane to the ridiculous. He would have put money on it being some kind of problem with the templars in her old Circle… point was, it shouldn’t have been bleeding.

Except it wasn’t blood, Bull knew.

“Headache,” she announced, after what seemed like hours. She pressed a palm to her temple. “Feels too… full. Too sharp.”

“Want me to come sit with you?” Bull ventured. He didn’t have anything else to offer. He’d been kept away from her ‘medication’ from the start. Innocuous as it was, however, this was an invitation which had received unpredictable responses in the past.

Elizabeth turned her eyes away. Her free hand drifted across to her opposite arm and clenched tightly at a spot where the cloth of her shirt was bulging outward in a strange shape.

“Yeah. Please,” she replied, surprisingly quickly. “It hurts,” she added in a small voice, fingers digging into the skin of her scalp. In a couple of places, the gouges she’d made with her nails were still healing up. No risk of doing that again; she’d bitten them down to the quick since then.

Bull moved over unhurriedly, keeping his hands visible, even as ever fibre of him strained to charge over there and sweep her up into his arms. He remembered all too well the outbursts and the sudden screaming fits of paranoia that had left him with no recourse but to leave and wait for her to calm down. Even sick and feverish, Elizabeth was still a mage. She was dangerous.

At length, he reached her side and sat down alongside her on the bed. Just a moment later, she shuffled over to him, resting her head against his arm. The flesh of her cheek was slick with sweat, hot and pulsing with a faint warmth that turned Bull’s stomach. A hand reached up to cling to him, and instincts warred with compassion, demanding he pull away, demanding he stay.

He covered her hand with his own, and gave a gentle squeeze.

How the fuck had this happened? How the fuck had it come to this?

Bull had played the events over and over in his mind until he was certain they’d be etched there permanently. As if forgetting something like this would even be possible.

A stumble. A complaint that she wasn’t feeling so well. Only natural – she was a mage and they’d been fighting red templars. A cheery smile and assurances that she was all right. And then collapsing face down in the snow. Panicked inspection, surgical and magical, searching for poison. And after a fashion, it _was_ poison.

The kind without an antidote.

This close, Bull could see the faint lines underneath Elizabeth’s pale skin, the places where it was… distorted. Mottled. Fragments of dark red wormed their way through the pallid flesh, creating whorls and disconcerting shapes that seemed to move each time Bull looked away from them. More, in the past few days.

Maybe it would be more accurate to call this a disease.

Elizabeth remained quiet, and so did Bull, content to follow her lead. He hoped, desperately, that at the very least his presence was some small comfort. It was impossible to tell. She hadn’t been much for conversation lately, and what little there had been was rarely coherent. A long, long month of watching her decline, of holding out hope for a damn miracle. Surely with so many intelligent people working on this, of scouring the lengths of Thedas for knowledge, surely _somebody_ would be able to find a solution. A cure.

She leaned against him harder, putting more weight on him. Tentatively, Bull stretched out his other arm and twisted, taking hold of her properly. For an instant, she struggled sluggishly, but the moment Bull made to let her go, she settled down again. He counted off the breaths, five, ten fifteen… and then decided that it was a go ahead. Bull cradled her gently, so fragile and yet so much more _heavy_ than was right for her size.

He wished he could reach into her and tear every piece of that infection out from her system. He could _see_ the fucking stuff, like it was deliberately taunting him with its presence, and with what it was doing to her.

They stayed that for a while, Bull holding her hand, her form deathly still, but her eyes open, fixed on the far wall, blank and empty.

“Ka…kadan?” her voice strained, the whispering of a moth’s wings.

“I’m here.”

Nothing. Silence. Those terrible eyes had slid shut. Bull licked his lips, kept his gaze fixed on her face. Desperately, he yearned to shake her by the shoulders, tell her to snap out of this, that he knew that she was strong enough to beat it. He did neither. He held her. He waited.

Soft breaths ghosted from her mouth, chest rising and falling only slightly. Back… back before, he’d liked watching her sleeping. Her face was always so peaceful and serene; a far cry from her usual anxiety and concern. Seeing her like that had made Bull proud of himself – proud of her, too. He’d made the right call, and she’d trusted him with it. They clicked. It worked, and for at least a little while, he could lift some of the weight from her shoulders.

Not today.

Her features twitched and twisted. Flinches of pain and deep frowns, an unspoken agony at what tormented her within. Every so often, something _shifted_ beneath the skin, only to vanish again, like a sea creature diving beneath the waves.

And then, suddenly, her lips curled upward. She exhaled. Her eyes opened again. For an instant, they locked onto him with crystal clarity, unclouded in spite of the red currents that swirled through them.

And when she spoke, she spoke with strength. Certainty. Determination.

“ _Katoh._ ”

 


End file.
